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Tips for my first game jam?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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GameDev
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Re-iterating TeaHands and Walops points. I think for me the biggest one is to start small. Like..pick something small, and then go smaller than that. I find that it can be useful to set a bronze/silver/gold endpoint for yourself:
This can help with motivation, because "failing" can often make you stop working because you de-motivated yourself, but not quite reaching your furthest estimation is motivation to push yourself.
Also something to keep in mind is that if you don't make your bronze goal at first, this just means that you have a skill that needs to be improved: scoping. This is something everybody struggles with. I have been a professional gamedev for 10 years and I still scope things to how I think things should go, or I scope time to "feature-complete" (ie it ticks the all the boxes it was supposed to), but not "complete" (there might be bugs, the art doesn't look right/etc..)
Also, version control is super useful, not just for tracking down bugs as Walop called out, but also for motivation. If you commit at least one thing at the end of everyday, you are basically keeping a journal of your work. This can be useful to look back on and realize even if you feel like you didnt get that much done, you can go back and see "hey I actually did all this stuff over the last week!"
Ah I love that bronze/silver/gold system, definitely gonna start incorporating that in my own stuff.
This x1000.
Re. Scoping, this is a really useful skill to nurture, that and accurately predicting how much time tasks are going to take you, which really go hand in hand.
Try to set up realistic goals/milestones for all your projects, not only gamejams, the bronze/silver/gold approach (which I'm borrowing if you don't mind) is a really good start, specially for jams, for longer projects you might want to take those and divide them in smaller goals!
Analyze when finishing each task how realistic your time/effort expectations were and eventually you'll nail your estimations more, you'll finish way more games when they don't creep in scope, ask me how I know!
This tip is seriously amazing, thanks! I took notes for my next try, though judging by how this one turned out, what I thought was bronze might actually be more like gold. ๐ Guess I gotta put in some work and fine-tune things a bit more.